WINTER'S QUITE A COLOR; ITS NAME IS MUD

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, January 17, 1993                   TAG: 9301150008
SECTION: CURRENT                    PAGE: NRV-2   EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY  
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium
WINTER'S QUITE A COLOR; ITS NAME IS MUD
In one of his poems, Robert Frost identifies a brief time during the early New England spring as mud time. It is, he writes, a span of days when the ground first softens beneath the rays of the increasingly warming sunlight.
Winter loosens its frozen grip on the earth: Stony hardness gives way to spongy softness. Less alliteratively put, there's mud everywhere.
He writes:
"The water for which we may have to look
In summertime with a witching-wand,
In every wheelrut's now a brook,
In every print of a hoof a pond."
Well, I think he should have considered himself lucky. At least in New England, the mud time lasts for only a short while in the spring. Here in Rye Hollow it often lasts all winter.
When it gets cold here in the New River Valley, it usually isn't for long. Certainly not long enough to freeze the ground for very long.
The weather here might be fairly described as variable, although most who've lived here any length of time have a less descriptively neutral name for it. Especially those of us living in the more rural parts of the valley.
I live in Giles County on a wooded hillside at the end of a long dirt driveway. The nearest paved road is almost two miles away.
At this point, I'd love it if we had one of those New England-style snowfalls that carpet the ground with thick layers of clean, white snow.
Most of what we've seen this year has either been rain or a drizzly grey mist, give or take an occasional day of freezing rain or light snow.
What we've got is mud. Lots of it.
The road has been so muddy for so long it makes no sense to even consider washing my truck. It's coated top to bottom with a layer of brown.
Walking from the truck to the house, you discover that the ground squishes beneath your feet. There is absolutely no way, short of removing your shoes, to prevent tracking at least some of the stuff into the house.
This means, of course, the entry mat has become so dirty that you either wash it every other day or risk having it become like an artist's palette, your feet spreading the muddy color across the floor.
And, too, there are the dogs.
These are not your little in-town, apartment-variety dogs. We're talking big, country-type dogs here. The kind that love to run and chase things across the mushy yard. The kind with big muddy feet.
For dogs, mud is one of the simple pleasures of life. There is no way to teach a dog to wipe its feet before it enters the house.
My neighbors, who've lived here all their lives, have advised me that we're in for a hard winter. All the signs point that way, they say.
The coats on this year's wooly caterpillars were more thickly banded in black than in brown. The cows head toward the barn earlier than usual. That sort of thing.
One can only hope.

Steve Kark is an instructor at Virginia Tech and a correspondent for the Roanoke Times & World-News. He writes from his home in scenic Rye Hollow, in a remote part of Giles County south of Pearisburg.

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB